


Cross the Country

by garyindistress



Category: Super Junior
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-13
Updated: 2012-12-13
Packaged: 2017-11-21 00:52:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/591587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garyindistress/pseuds/garyindistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s time,” the green pixie boy whispers urgently from the newly semi-defined sinew of Heechul’s left shoulder, “to grow fucking up.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cross the Country

In 2011 Heechul decides to enlist and despite what people will want to think, it has nothing to do with trauma, heartache, or resignation of any negative sort—nothing but the tinny voice that occasionally grazes the bottom of his earlobe, like the kind of childhood friend brazen enough to show up to your house uninvited. “It’s time,” the green pixie boy whispers urgently from the newly semi-defined sinew of Heechul’s left shoulder, “to grow fucking up.” He stomps a little, tutu aflutter, as if aware that the landscape has changed since his last visit.

Siwon pats him encouragingly on the back, which is still sore from two nights ago’s trip to the gym where, at least, they played good music from 2008 and every muscleman there lamented quietly why _they_ hadn’t put a ring on it. That was some kinky shit if you thought about it for too long. Heechul did, grunting through three sets of chest presses and timing his breaths to the synthetic claps Beyonce whoa-oh-ohed over. “I think this is a good thing, hyung,” as if it were his idea.

“If I die young,” Heechul sings solemnly, “Bury me in—“

“My backyard,” Siwon finishes in the wrong key. “And the most beautiful flowers will bloom.”

The imagery is more morbid than probably he intended. 

 

 

“Who’re you going to miss the most?” Hyukjae asks, fishing. 

“Donghae,” Shindong and Donghae guess at roughly the same time. They sleepily high-five and miss.

Heechul leans back against his pillow, trying to regain feeling in his leg under Shindong. The small bedroom is even smaller with this many people in it. Jungsu has fallen asleep beside him, fingers curled into an angry baby fist, face splotchy from possibly clawing at his makeup moments before passing out. At times Heechul thinks they look younger without the artificial coloring, their bare, uneven faces a callback to early puberty and all its delightful awkwardness. It apparently is still happening to Sungmin. Heechul doesn’t even have the heart to hate him.

“I think it’s me,” Hyukjae is saying. “He called me good-looking today on Strong Heart. It was the first time I’d heard it from him.”

Squeezed next to Jungsu, Ryeowook mumbles in his sleep, “And the last time. . .”

“What I’m still upset about,” Heechul changes the subject, “is the fact that Siwon likes the magnae best. Don’t you get sick of him in China?”

“The more I see him, thicker doth my love grow,” comes Siwon’s voice from below. Kyuhyun’s snoring into his shoulder. “No, of course you’re up there, too, hyung. Just not my favorite.”

Heechul wonders what changed.

“When will I be someone’s favorite?” Yesung ponders loudly to himself.

It’s not like he’s leaving forever, but they’re all busy smothering him to death. The holding capacity of his room should be around four and a half, the half for a small litter of cats.

“Let’s not pretend to be best friends, guys,” he would’ve said two years ago, but it’s nothing they don’t already know.

\- - -

Recording was weird earlier last month, because Donghae and Siwon were still in China. Heechul had gotten a little sick of Jungsu’s face, and it wasn’t like they hadn’t already known each other for a decade. There were waxes and wanes. Sometimes it felt like every day transformed him into something brand new. Which was fresh, good. Even looking into the mirror was a goddamn surprise. But all things considered, he was in a pretty tight place right now. His skin was clear. His stomach was flat.

They did a few interviews while the other half of the band promoted in China. Heechul spiffed up for most of them, inspired by an unfamiliar resolve or the foreboding feeling—which hit infrequently but also unfailingly like a punch below the belt—that someday soon he’d miss even this, rattling off the same answers to the same, tired questions. 

“Do you have a favorite member within Super Junior?” 

Heechul cocked his head to invoke careful consideration or an inability to decide, because it was _so hard_ , but really his scalp was itching where he hadn’t completely washed out the conditioner this morning when their manager started banging down the bathroom door. Jungsu’s fault for not waking him up in time or stopping him from staying up all night for several rounds of drunken arm wrestling against Hongki. He’d knocked over a couple beer bottles reaching under his bed for his favorite Galliano shirt and now the entire room smelled like the basement of a Hongdae joint. Jungsu was paying for dry cleaning.

“Siwon,” he said finally, because the other day had been Ryeowook. 

“Why is that?”

Heechul looked at the place Siwon would’ve been sitting if he weren’t pretending to be good at Mandarin on Taiwanese variety shows. 

“He’s a standup guy, and he puts up with me. We disagree on a lot of things, but we get along like brothers.”

Afterwards he wondered how much of his answer had been true and how much fashioned to sound better than they were, dressing up their friendship to hang on a highway billboard. He’d left out that with Siwon, something was more often than not missing. How, on a bad day Heechul wanted to tear him apart. In his heart of hearts. Because _how could this be it_ , he’d fume, gesturing in his imagination at the full perfect length of Siwon’s chiseled body. _Do you ever veer away from this dull emotional neutral that you’ve built your life around?_ This speed bump-free flatline. 

Only on a very bad day—the count of which seemed to be diminishing with time and, perhaps, wisdom. Thank God.

 

 

Maybe 2010 would be, Kibum had mused, Heechul’s Harry Potter book 5, when they were drunk enough to joke about it. Heechul had seen the manips, that was about it. Somehow he always ended up as the blonde girl. She wasn’t even a main character.

“But she’s hot,” Kibum said, snorting into his glass. “And you have longish hair.”

“And you’ve gotten fat.” Heechul immediately regretted it. Kibum was silent, his hand fallen over the table, and then his throat bubbled over with laughter. This was why people drank.

Kibum was the best person to drink with, because he didn’t ask questions. He already deduced the answer in Heechul’s body movements, jerky but tired, tinged with something soft and desperate. 

It was mid-February, too early to tell how the rest of the year would go. Heechul slept in Kibum’s kitchen and woke up in his own bed. That was the morning he lost it.

 

 

Heechul always figured he’d keep going long as he still had it. That morning he woke up and it was gone.

This was a manic phase, he reasoned logically. Knowing didn’t help.

He gave himself a good hard look in the mirror, rearranging his hair one way and then another. Grease rubbed off on his palms, illuminating them. His head thrummed like a persistent series of door knocks.

The only thing to do, he thought, or the only thing he knew how to do was drive. So he ignored the sharp protests of the pixie boy who hibernated in the shell of his ear, grabbed the keys off the dresser, put on his second favorite pair of shades, and left a voicemail for Jungsu in the elevator foyer. 

Only when his foot touched the accelerator did he realize it was a marvel he hadn’t gotten here sooner.

\- - - 

When Siwon heard from Jungsu that Heechul had run away, he was on the set of a 200-million won car commercial. It was either this or more chicken (and bubble baths, if you were Donghae). The cell phone buzzed on the dressing room counter during his water break and he removed the bottle from his lips to speak into the mouthpiece. “Hyung?”

“I need you to do something, Siwon.”

Jungsu hadn’t told anyone else, for reasons undisclosed and, at the time, unnecessary. Siwon was momentarily flattered by his trust before he remembered what was at stake. This was the approximate vocabulary his mind assumed that day: stiff, pragmatic. He hung up and put the phone away. He drummed his fingers against his right kneecap and then returned to the set to successfully film the rest of the shoot.

He carefully changed into a low v-neck t-shirt and jeans before getting into his car. He drove for three miles, unaware that he wasn’t going anywhere, aware that he was more nervous than he’d planned, and then another two hundred before Heechul could see him from the window of his hotel room.

When he tells the story later, he chalks it up to primal instinct, an unbreakable brotherly bond. He sniffed the road for Heechul’s scent, followed the tar trail and up those rickety steps to his hotel room. “Brother my ass,” Heechul barks, biteless, though he will eventually use the same line in an interview. At this point the air they share is recycled, and the thoughts communal, as if working side by side with someone for a couple years grants them access to most original part of your soul.

To his credit, Siwon found him in less than twenty-four hours. Heechul didn’t put up much of a fight, either. It made sense, suddenly, when he spotted the familiar black car parked outside the inn. People who looked to be lost didn’t go where they could be found.

 

 

As a kid, Siwon had been fascinated by cars.

“When you grow up, I want you to be responsible and buy one that uses fuel efficiently.”

His father had turned the key in the ignition and then leaned over to buckle him in. Siwon must’ve been eight or nine at the time. The last time he was in the car he’d traced out a heart on the fogged up window. The heart was still there. 

They were headed for McDonalds, because Siwon got full marks on his last math test and earned the right to fast food, otherwise banned in the household. He didn’t understand the difference between a normal car and a fuel-efficient one, but he said, “Of course, dad.” It was the first and last time he witnessed his dad’s driving. Their chauffeur had called in sick very late that morning.

Efficiency, he learned later, had to do with more than just cars. You could be emotionally efficient and never waste a feeling on something that didn’t deserve to be felt for. There was energy conservation. 

Siwon kept his hand gestures controlled and his mind clear. His faith helped with the latter. 

Living efficiently, though, meant something else. Being on good terms with everyone but not the best terms. To make and keep many casual friends but few close ones. To be charming but not overreaching. Those kinds of people sailed through life with the least problems, enemy- and worry-free. Those were the heroes he remembered from movies and folk tales and the ones he admired the most.

\- - - 

It wouldn’t stop raining in Gyeongsangnam, but the rain didn’t do anything about the sweltering heat. Heechul cursed his luck, but he respected where the hundred-won coin eventually fell. Lee Soonshin’s face stared sternly at him from just under the tail of Daegu. Heechul pocketed the coin before setting his hands on the wheel.

Of course Jungsu would send Siwon, _of course_. Heechul was halfway between resentment towards Jungsu and an idle meditation on the image of Lee Soonshin’s impressive beard when Siwon rolled onto his side, wrapped his arm around Heechul, and pulled him in until they were hugging. Neither of them had showered yet, and the ahjumma who ran the inn turned on the A/C only during the day. The indistinct scent of dried sweat hung in the air like pollen. Where they touched they stuck. Siwon breathed lightly into Heechul’s neck. It was uncomfortable, but Heechul saw value in the gesture. He missed being held.

After Siwon got up to shower, Heechul reached his hand to rub at the strange moisture on the back of his neck.

“Just checked the weather, hyung. The roads should be fine tomorrow.”

Tomorrow was Saturday. 

“Actually, let’s stay another day,” Siwon changed his mind. “or two. I’ve never been here before, either.”

 

 

The passage of time slowed inside that room, a phenomenon common to most rooms in Siwon’s experience. And he wasn’t like Heechul, content to sit in front of his laptop for ages despite being beyond extroverted around celebrities he’d never met before when the occasion called for it. Heechul could be broken into different parts, one of which thrived in the darkest of dark corners, but Siwon was made whole. He needed light to survive.

He rented a fishing rod from the only store in sight for miles and let it sit at the lake. He didn’t even have the bait, but that wasn’t the point. It was quiet here, especially when the cicadas paused. He’d gone on pilgrimages before, but none of them had been like this. He wanted to go on another in a few years, maybe just before enlistment, to find deeper peace. 

“It’s too quiet.” Heechul slipped into the spot beside him. “And the reception sucks. I can’t get online to Twitter.” He must’ve seen the look on Siwon’s face, because he continued: “Not that I would tweet anything right now. Unless I wanted people to guess where I was. This,” he gestured toward the lake, the fields past the lake, the distant mountainous skyline, “looks the same everywhere. Farmland. Have you ever looked at a postcard, one of those rural pastures, and thought, ‘Oh, I know exactly where this is’?” They’re all clones.” He stopped, poking his tongue against the inside of his cheek. “You know, I tone down the cursing when you’re around. Not on purpose either. You’re just that saintly.”

Neither of them said anything for a while.

“Hyung--”

“I know you know--about me. You’re not stupid, Siwon. You figured it out, after being in denial for ages, so when Jungsu handed you the torch you thought--you’d turn it into a guiding light or something, am I right?”

He might be, Siwon realized. The realization burned in his chest, simmering into guilt and shame as Heechul continued.

“I shouldn’t be like this. I know. But I, we, shouldn’t be here right now, either, so let’s just have it all out in the open. I want to be a father someday, Siwonnie. I’m not unnatural.” 

“I never said that, hyung. Look--”

“Don’t lie. You’re fucking terrified right now. Sorry. You probably want to die. This is your worst nightmare. Tonight you’ll pray harder than you usually do, for your hyung who’s going to burn in Hell.” Heechul took a breath, kicked a stone. “I’m not making fun of you, okay? I get it.”

But he didn’t, Siwon thought, because Siwon didn’t even get it. It was a test, he knew, but it was also real. His heartbeat was quickening, but he remained in his default state of being: composed. Heechul was right. He did know, but that wasn’t why he came. He came because they were brothers. He came for the same reason that he stuck with Super Junior in the first place--to see if he could, and then, because he couldn’t not. Siwon saw things through. Siwon cared about people, carefully. He was the person to go to for a loan, and not just because of the inheritance, though that was certainly an incentive to a stranger. 

 

 

They took turns driving back, with hours of rest between. “Let’s just follow this black line and see where it takes us,” Siwon suggested, brainwashed by the landscape into Beatnik romanticism.

“Are you serious?” Heechul was already entering their dorm address into Google maps. 

Heechul understood. They didn’t have that kind of friendship—rather, Siwon wasn’t that kind of person. He knew all about Heechul’s internal turmoil (who didn’t?) but wasn’t going to play Papa Bear or give him a patronizing shoulder rub. His days of acting self-righteous for jokes, for the cameras, were done. In all fairness, it’d been so long, and they were all of them apart more often than not. (Even the dorms adopted a musty smell, like old, unused books. They couldn’t blame it on Hyukjae because Hyukjae was in Taiwan. Come and flip our pages, the walls were whispering. I don’t really care, Heechul thought, shrugging into the vanity mirror.)

The thing was, they’d been close. There was a time when Siwon had Heechul on his speed dial, because under immediate family and a handful of church friends he would’ve wanted Heechul to be there while they had his stomach pumped from an accidental overdose of allergy medication or hold his hand as he was wheeled into the emergency room after a terrible car crash. But the distance between them widened so gracefully and gradually that before Siwon knew it, he’d lost any right he might have had, which was debatable in the first place, to intervene in Heechul’s life. When he came to the realization, starkly clear when it dawned upon him one afternoon earlier that year as he was meditating upon a particularly meaningful passage of a book he received from Sooyoung, it was a little, unexpectedly devastating but also unexpectedly right. The distance, he decided immediately as his mind wrapped around the thought, was natural. For as long as Siwon had known Heechul, he’d always been troubled. The degree varied. He had periods of calm where he’d stay in the dorm and play on the computer with Kyuhyun and intently watch Ryeowook’s back as he slouched over the stove. Some of it was inspired by Hankyung at the time, but Hankyung was an external force. He couldn’t wriggle himself like an idea into Heechul and never let go. Heechul’s mind didn’t come with handlebars. But Siwon was thinking in retrospect. No one could’ve known then, and they’d been so young.

He was less disturbed than he should’ve been by his own lack of reaction. He was more disturbed now, recalling the himself from just a month or two ago. 

He parked right outside of a GS25 and looked over at the passenger seat. Heechul’s scraggly mess of hair had covered his face, lending it a spooky effect. They could’ve been recreating a horror movie. 

It was a beautiful full moon tonight, he noticed, framing it briefly between his fingers, which were stiff from driving. Maybe they were werewolves. He laughed to himself for a few seconds before closing his eyes.

\- - - 

They set out for the Taiwanese leg of Super Show 2 the week after. Kyuhyun and Ryeowook proved again that being able to sing well in another language didn’t mean you could get waitresses to understand you better than excitedly pointing at a greasy menu. They arrived at the wrong restaurants, ate the wrong dumplings (nevertheless delicious), and overpaid—or Yesung did when he lost the 3-6-9 game twice in a row. “You’re faking it, right?” Kyuhyun groaned when Yesung forgot to yell bbing-bbong at “6.” Thanks to Yesung, Sungmin never got his turn, which was not new to Sungmin, either.

March, then, was Shanghai. During his line in their encore of “Dancing Out,” Siwon swung an arm over Heechul’s shoulder and leaned in to kiss him on the mouth. Heechul was laughing because they hadn’t planned this. Siwon had brought it up, that maybe he’d go for it and make out with one of them onstage, but Heechul figured that in the celebrity versus religiosity war within his head the latter would always win, or if it didn’t, he would’ve chosen someone new and—less experienced, or something. 

It was an apology, he decided later. Maybe an admission, too.

\- - - 

If he has to address the elephant in the room, he’ll do it. Doing it:

So, most of 2009 had been okay for them, even if they’d ironed out the excitement long ago. All that was left were these little wrinkles, stuff like, “Hey, you forgot to shave there,” and then cute disgusting things that would ensue. No one really wants to hear about it. 

Realistically, though, of course the onset of a relationship shone the brightest—when every piece of new information was still a surprise, a delight, tickled you. Every thing was a _thing_. The eye-crinkling was _so cute_ , and the way he got huffy when you tried to change the channel. Fighting over the remote was a thing; his fruitless banging on the bathroom door and yelling for you to get out because Heechul, you know I’ve been very patient (tripping over those syllables like small intrusive pebbles between his teeth) but even I’m on my last nerve, only to eventually join you under the showerhead, careful hands dragging down over your hips and the slow, somber stare of a, a war criminal or something, but wasn’t he just a mama’s boy dressed up in a tolerably attractive husk of a man? And he pulled you in, and the water sealed you together, and you were a jar airtight, not breathing, because you couldn’t handle being kissed like this. Never happened before, so you knew this, too, was definitely a thing.

So Heechul wasted no time in saying yes when Jungsu offered to set him up with his celebrity lady friend (“It’s a surprise,” with a calculatedly artful smirk. “Just your type, I promise.”), because feeling good again didn’t just happen from walking around the house in pajamas for two weeks with the sleeves too big for your arms not being able to differentiate between sleep and lucidity, either way you were the same kind of numb. He wore a casual yet tastefully designed t-shirt with his favorite skinnies ripped over the left knee and arrived only five minutes late. She was pretty and slim, with an oval face and a chin that dipped with every smile. He liked her more than expected, but less than enough, but it didn’t matter. They were together for most of 2010, he masturbated less, and when it ended he wondered if he didn’t like her more than he thought, more than less than enough, just right, but like most of Kim Heechul’s reflections this one lingered until it soured, then turned bittersweet, then finally tasteless and forgotten, and in the morning the alcoholic stink in his throat was the only reminder that he’d thought anything at all.

Happy now?

\- - - 

“Let’s go out for drinks.”

Coming from Heechul that’s almost an order. 

“Sure, hyung. When?”

“I’ll meet you at your place around 9.”

He has less than a week left before heading to Nonsan and week’s worth of full head of hair left. It has to last. He doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but everyone around him is, and caring rubs off. 

He knows Siwon’s going to cry, probably. If he has a heart at all, he will. Heechul isn’t so sure about himself. Against his better judgment his own has hardened.

“Be honest,” he says over the sixth bottle, fingering the label. “Were you ever in love with me?”

Siwon is drunk, too. “Oh, hyung,” he says, slapping the table as if Heechul were Kang Hodong. He laughs until his eyes shine and doesn’t answer the question.

\- - - 

One didn’t just fall in love with Kim Heechul. That would’ve been easy.

And if that feeling was love, then Siwon assumed that he must’ve loved a dozen other men as well. And that he could’ve been forgiven for it.

If he was being honest, the first time was when Heechul described the way the doctors withdrew the last of the several metal rods keeping his leg intact. “After the anesthetic, I couldn’t really feel anything. It was fucking incredible.” Donghae listened in fascination, and Siwon swallowed a lump in his throat that he hadn’t known was there. Hankyung walked into the living room and rested his hand on Heechul’s shoulder. A year earlier the camera had zoomed in on his and Yunho’s teary eyes and stone-set jaws while Heechul made his comeback onstage for the first time in over three months. No one else’s reactions mattered.

The second was on the bed of that inn, the night after fishing. 

“It’s like an old favorite song that, whenever you hear it, you remember all the words and sing along, and you remember when it was your favorite. It’s over, though. I—you know that. But that doesn’t stop you from remembering, every time you hear it, remember feeling how much you loved it, even if it’s not an active kind of, very present thing anymore. We’re still friends, of course, and I love him.”

Siwon hadn’t known what to say. He found Heechul’s hand beside his on the mattress and squeezed.

None of it mattered, in the larger scheme of things. Every man had to be tested now and then, he reminded himself. He posted inspirational quotes on Twitter. He prayed, posed, acted, sang (minimally), laughed, and loved, but in that careful way he’d been taught, which wasn’t the way one would love Kim Heechul.

\- - - 

“I’m going now,” Heechul says.

Even Hyukjae is trying hard, biting down on his lip. He’s failing.

“Come back a man,” Jungsu calls.

“Hyung,” Siwon says. “I’ll miss you.”

His hair is bristly. From the back no one could’ve recognized him—another skinny guy in a buzz cut. For two years he will be ordinary, his patience tried, his ego occasionally bruised. People will adore and despise him. They’re yielding him to a strange crowd, one that couldn’t possibly appreciate him for every percent of what he unfailingly is and tries to stand for. (Honesty and a crass sort of pride, selective self-awareness, but that, also, remains part of his charm, for those he has charmed, which is many.) But they’ll get him back, too, and he’ll be better, if different. Not where it counts. Never where it counts, hyung.

They salute and wave until he disappears through the entrance of the training center, until their arms are sore and even the fans have ceased their tears.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading ♥ I know it's kind of stupid to leave lengthy small-font notes at the end of fics but it was either here or the beginning, and here made more sense. First, my apologies again to for making her wait so long for just this. I knew I'd have to save this for last because it was Suju and SiChul, which I'd never written in earnest before. But it was good to have to think about them seriously, especially Siwon. So thank you for choosing a pairing that would make me think ♥
> 
>  
> 
> The other reason for this sudden essay is this was the last of my fic obligations for... maybe ever, and while I have a few plunnies and WIPs stashed away, none of them are Suju-related, and as much as I still love them I hadn't really written them in half a year and it kind of feels like it'll stay that way. (omg this a/n is getting dumber and dumber) Watch me swallow these words the actual day that Heechul enlists fjaljf but right now it feels like an "it's been a good run" moment. I've been in this fandom for a little over two years, met a lot of unforgettable people, read [amazing mind-blowing fic](http://superjupiters.livejournal.com), [laughed](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4tKkKHCgGw), [cried](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OfKPD1EzY4), found solace when I needed it, and left knowing that it'd be waiting here when I got back. But as I realized [with this performance](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mtGUw8MQxY&feature=player_embedded), you don't really ever leave Suju. They stick! So yeah, I don't know what I'm saying, but it's been really, really great, and thanks for sharing these boys with me. ♥
> 
>  
> 
>   
> [the backstory](http://warmboys.livejournal.com/51833.html)


End file.
